501–510 of 837 posts
Here's an unrelated but related question: How do you store your wallet / private keys where you would be comfortable storing an amount of money that's important to you? It feels like a bunch of consumer grade options we have are kind of flaky: Flash drives are extremely undependable. I've had a few fail to read after sitting in a closet for a year. SSDs can supposedly have data loss pretty quickly if left unpowered (…
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TL;DR: He completely lost his money by entering the wrong details rather than testing payment first.
He tested it by converting Euros to Dollars first, used it for a while and then put Dollars in to the same machine and they were shredded. He did test but using the wrong mental model.
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Nobody is worried about sending funds to „foobar“. People are worried about sending funds to a syntactically valid address that no one has access to.
This is impossible to solve, in the cryptocurrency space or in the existing structures we have. When you send an email, you cannot know if someone actually has access to that account (maybe they forgot their password?), you can only know if the address is valid or not (by sending the email). Similarly, you don't know if the right person has access to the bank account you're sending funds to, unless you ask the person…
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The problem with crypto is despite your explanation, I have no idea what any of your post means. Not any of it.
Ok so the problem then seems to be with your understanding of the space, not with crypto itself. I don't go to a geneticist and go "the problem with genetics is I have no idea what any of it means".
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On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.
Sending currency to non-existant addresses is how people encode arbitary data on the bitcoin blockchain, so definitely possible. Giving a person control over the funds allocated to their smart contract probably opens holes where they can steal the smart contract's money, though obviously creating software that handles money and can't be updated is its own kettle of fish.
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In simple words, he should have done what everyone else does and used Uniswap or Zapper or Sushi or ANY exchange and swapped WETH for ETH that way. This is just a dumbass user doing dumbass things. This is basic-level stuff right here. Don't interact with contracts directly unless you 100% know what you're doing.
But people are allowed to interact with smart contracts. To obtain the WETH he needed to do that. This is a "why do we even have that lever" kind of situation. If my brokerage had a "permanently burn all of your money" button then it wouldn't be reasonable to just say "well, people shouldn't push that button." We can even see this with the criticism of wire fraud. Wire fraud is a huge fucking mess that occasionally c…
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In simple words, he should have called a smart contract's function which would withdraw his tokens and send real ETH to his address. Instead, he sent tokens to smart contract's address and they will stay there forever, not associated with any account. This complexity should be abstracted away by wallet's UI. Users don't have to call APIs directly. Also, this whole situation could be prevented by trying to send a smal…
In simple words, he should have done what everyone else does and used Uniswap or Zapper or Sushi or ANY exchange and swapped WETH for ETH that way. This is just a dumbass user doing dumbass things. This is basic-level stuff right here. Don't interact with contracts directly unless you 100% know what you're doing.
I tend to agree. Dumbasses clearly designed this system if it allows money to be accidentally destroyed. Dumbasses doing dumbass things indeed.
Newer contracts, if built well, have rescue mechanisms built in.
Smart contracts really shouldn't be called contracts - it's a misleading analogy.
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On BTC, you could send things to the wrong address, yes. But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address. In this case it seems like the contract has created the black hole (not the Ethereum blockchain itself), but that's even more absurd since someone ultimately should have control over everything that was put into the contract, regardless of the source.
> But you can't send the wrong type of currency or send it to a nonexistent address Of course you can do both things, which is why catastrophic financial ruin is a daily fear when dealing with cryptocurrencies. https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-find-my-Bitcoin-cash-that-I-...
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Or like sticking the wrong plastic card into an ATM and observe the machine eat the card... and your bank account. You'd expect that invalid actions lead to idempotent errors, not glitch states where you lose everything.
It's not an invalid action. This was a valid action, it was just a stupid ass action.